If I understand your problem correctly, you have a dynamic site with lots of potential pages and are wondering how to create a site map that will allow spiders (and people) to get to the pages easily.

One quick and dirty way would be to do a few searches in a catagory format, then save the results as hard coded HTML.

For example, lets say you have a site about automotive parts. Presumably the dynamic system you have allows you to search, and then returns results. What you can do is perform a search on (for example) Spark Plugs and get the results as a page with a series of links. Your database has already generated the HTML code, which is now spider friendly (most of the time).

You can then take these results as HTML and put them into a site map with the heading "Spark Plugs". In short, by doing searches and then creating a page with the results, you have now created your site map.

The problem spiders have is that they can't do the search (they don't type). But they CAN spider the results of the search. You just have to have them generated ahead of time with an HTML link to that page.

I would look into having your database guys generate a page that is the results of a series of searches. It's easy to write a script that regenerates the site map every morning or everytime there is a change to the site. If they tell you it's too hard or can't be done, tell them there is an SEO you know that is obviously better at database programming than they are - you should have your site map shortly after that

For your information, Yahoo does something similar to this. Due to the volume they get, it would totally overload the system if the database had to generate the results every time. So they have generated the HTML pages from their database ahead of time and simply serve out the static pages, which is way faster and accepted database performance optimisation procedure. Yahoo is basically a "Site Map" for the internet (or parts of it, anyway).

These guys are from Australia and I talked to them at the SES conference last week. (Mostly cuz I liked their accents! )

At any rate, they have some software that you install on your server, and it creates a sitemap of your site automatically, with static links that the search engines can spider. Sounds pretty cool.

I did tell them that they should definitely make sure these sitemap pages are visibly linked on the site (because I don't think they're always doing that now) and they said that you can definitely do that. And I believe you can change the format of the site map page also, so that it's also people friendly.

Check them out and see what you think. It looks good on the surface, but I haven't completely checked them out. Tell them Jill sent you if you talk to them!

Thanks to both of you. I did blast off a quick note to the "Spider Linker" people asking for some info. Like I told them, my wife and I are trying to get out of here to visit Mickey in Disney. Might not be able to reply untill next week.

"I heard about your product Spyder Linker on Jill Whalen's forum HighRankings.com. Can you give us more information and cost of your product?
Best Regards"

and got this response within a few hours:

"Thank you for your enquiry.

I took a quick look at Google, and could see that Google was not indexing the dynamic pages on your website.

I attach a White Paper on Spider Linker, which provides details of the product. With regards to cost, you purchase the software as a perpetual license (essentially you own it). The cost is based on the number of URLs linked. Looking at your site, it looks like you might need a 500 URL or 1,500 URL license. The prices for these are as follows:

Support and maintenance, which includes free upgrades of the software is available on an annual basis as shown above.

Best regards

Rahmon Coupe
YourAmigo"

A little too expensive for me right now but who knows for a larger site with the larger volume and much bigger budget. They still didn't provide a detailed description of their software, so how do they think any will buy without price and description? I Think they need Jill, Scottie, Karon and others here! They Rock!

A little too expensive for me right now but who knows for a larger site with the larger volume and much bigger budget. They still didn't provide a detailed description of their software, so how do they think any will buy without price and description?

I agree that they sound like they are a tad expensive for what I want to do.I did get all the info you mentioned and sorta breezed through it. I foundseveral misspellings in the PDF document and was generally did not get thatwarm and fuzzy feeling.

They did ask me to pass on a "HI" to Jill:"Thank you for your interest and give our regards to Jill whom we met at theSearch Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. Spider Linker truly is a "breakthrough product" that can make all the web pages on a site including the invisible ones (ie dynamic pages from databases, session ID's, Domino Server, Broadvision, .Net, unlinked static content, etc) visible to search engines such as Google. Spider Linker can also be used as a site map and can send XML feeds to the major search engines."